Forthcoming in print in the new year in Antipode 46(1), Carrie Mott and Susan Roberts’ paper ‘Not Everyone Has (the) Balls: Urban Exploration and the Persistence of Masculinist Geography’ has been available online since July.

It engages with the growing body of work on urban exploration in geography and related disciplines, offering thoughts on the exclusions and marginalisations unaddressed in much of it. Looking at both popular and academic treatments of ‘urbex’, Carrie and Sue put feminist scholarship on embodiment and social difference to work to identify ‘a prevalent and largely unacknowledged culture of masculinism’. Their paper asks: Whose bodies explore? What counts as experience? What constitutes the exchange between body and place? And, with what effects? (see their introductory video abstract here).

Here we’re pleased to be able to make available a critical response to the paper and the authors’ reply.

Bradley Garrett (whose work features in ‘Not Everyone Has (the) Balls’) and Harriet Hawkins have written a response to Carrie and Susan in which they ‘take up the invitation that they offer’ and engage with questions of social difference and embodiment, mobilising, among other things, non-representational theories: ‘we want, in the same spirit of feminist creative-critique, to revisit the practices and nascent geographical literatures on urban exploration, to mark new directions within them’.

Carrie and Susan have replied to Bradley and Harriet’s essay, continuing the conversation on the politics and ethics of radical geographic theory and practice.